As the political party that ruled Mexico for seven straight decades regains power, it has assured Mexicans there's no chance of a return to what some called "the perfect dictatorship" that was marked by a mixture of populist handouts, rigged votes and occasional bloodshed.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, reclaims the presidency Saturday after 12 years out of power, and President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto calls it a crowning moment of an effort to reform and modernize the party that ruled without interruption from 1929 to 2000.

He promises an agenda of free enterprise, efficiency and accountability. He's pushing for reforms that could bring major new private investment in Mexico's crucial but creaking state-owned oil industry, changes that have been blocked for decades by nationalist suspicion of foreign meddling in the oil business.

PRI leaders acknowledge the party is returning to power in a Mexico radically different from what it was in the party's heyday. The nation has an open, market-oriented economy, a freer, more aggressive press, an opposition that can communicate at the speed of the Internet and a population that knows that the PRI can be kicked out of power.

"The skeptics say that the PRI will return to the past, as if such a thing were possible," PRI leader Pedro Joaquin Coldwell told a party gathering earlier this month. "It's not, because this is a different country."

Yet critics already see hints of a yearning for the old days of an imperial presidency in some of the measures the PRI is pushing through Congress.

A bill proposed by Peña Nieto would gather the police and security apparatus under the control of the Interior Department, an office long used by the PRI to co-opt or pressure opponents, rig elections and strong-arm the media.

PRI leaders say the measure would unify a fractured security apparatus and produce a more coordinated strategy in Mexico's fight against drug cartels.

Political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio says a return to the old ways is unlikely, noting there are now independent electoral authorities, judges and rights groups to help keep authorities in line. "I don't think they'll try to restore the old regime, like we saw in the 1970s," he said.

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